Life After Work - Will I Be "OK"?

  Last week my daughter got married in D.C. to mark yet another milestone.   Now that both of my kids are married, it kind of feels like another of my jobs is now done.   Between my retirement 4 months ago and the wedding, that’s a lot of change in a short amount of time.     It was a great weekend all around.   Both the welcome reception the night before the wedding and wedding itself were spectacular.   Best of all there were no unexpected hiccups and very little drama.   And to answer your question, yes, I did cry.   But in my defense, I was totally set up.   They now do a first look for the father.   They made me stand outside the hotel with my eyes closed and then had Kim come stand beside me.   They made me wait a full minute before they let me turn around.   By that point, I had no chance to hold it together.   She looked so amazing and so grown up.   And yes, there might have been a tear or two when I w...

  Big week this week.   My daughter is getting married in DC on Saturday.   Doesn’t get much bigger than that.   Last week I wrote about how it can be challenging to save for retirement or stick to your retirement income plan when you are helping both younger and older family members financially ( Are We Really Facing a Retirment Crises? by Scott Stolz (week 16) ).   Weddings are a perfect example.   But this is one expense I’m happy to take on.   And it helped that it was not unexpected.   Still, like everything else, weddings cost have gotten a bit out of hand.   I mean, should you really have to pay extra for flatware?   Shouldn’t that just be part of the meal cost?   I thought I could recover some of the cost by placing a bet online against the odds of me getting through the entire weekend without crying.   But I guess DraftKings determined that the odds of that are at least 1000-1, so they wouldn’t take the bet just in c...

  Forbes recently published an article entitled “The Looming Retirement Crises is Real and So Are the Solutions” ( The Looming Retirement Crisis Is Real And So Are The Solutions .)   A quick search on any search engine and you will find other stories that discuss this “Retirement Crises.”   In fact, it’s easy to find plenty of statistics that support the case for such a crisis. ThinkAdvisor recently published a list of “13 Scary Retirement Statistics” ( 13 Scary Retirement Statistics to Read in the Dark: 2025 ).   I won’t cover all 13, but here are a few that jumped out at me: 1.       Nearly 6 in 10 workers expect to outlive their retirement savings 2.       62% said that caregiving of other family members is keeping them from saving for retirement 3.       Half of all workers are prioritizing savings for their children’s college over saving for retirement 4.       ...

  My wife and I spend the summers at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri.   We are fortunate to have a home on the Lake that my wife inherited from her parents.   While we typically have some extremely hot days there in the summer, it’s much more pleasant than the Florida summer heat.   Not surprisingly, most people associate Lake of the Ozarks with the show “Ozark.”   If you’ve watched the show and never been to the actual Lake, you would assume that it’s a pretty rustic place with mostly small cabins and the occasional boat or two.   Nothing can be further from the truth.   Even after 5 summer stays at the Lake, I still marvel at the number of mega mansions and $500,000+ boats.   The picture below belongs to our next-door neighbor.   Trust me, our house pales in comparison. While this house is the largest by far on our street, if you take a short boat ride in either direction from our house, you will see countless houses that are comparable....